Since you're already in a bad mood

One of those non-existent technological quick fixes is biofuels, the idea of growing crops for the purpose of using them as fuel to replace fossil fuels.

Biofuels[, Food First says,] invoke an image of renewable abundance that allows industry, politicians, the World Bank, the UN, and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to present fuel from corn, sugarcane, soy and other crops as a smooth transition from peak oil to a renewable fuel economy. ...

Industrialized countries have unleashed an “agro-fuels boom” by mandating ambitious renewable fuel targets. Renewable fuels are to provide 5.75% of Europe’s transport fuel by 2010, and 10% by 2020. The U.S. goal is 35 billion gallons a year.

But as Food First goes on to show, this is a dangerous course, environmentally wasteful, economically damaging to the nations of the Global South (as Food First calls them), as they would have to bear the burden of the production of crops for fuel, thus increasing hunger there - and at the end of it all, would have at most a minor impact on global warming:

[W]hen the full “life cycle” of agro-fuels is considered—from land clearing to automotive consumption—the moderate emission savings are undone by far greater emissions from deforestation, burning, peat drainage, cultivation, and soil carbon losses.

The net result, according to new research reported by the Independent (UK) last week, is that

one of the main measures proposed to combat climate change - growing extra crops for to make biofuels - places "massive additional pressures on ecosystems".

And those are ecosystems, that new study shows, that are already being "pushed to the breaking point" as humanity "devours" the Earth's life-support systems.

Even before the feared climate change really begins the bite, the planet is already under intolerable strain. An unprecedented study by top ecologists and climatologists, to be published by the US National Academy of Sciences, shows that a quarter of all plant life in the world is being destroyed each year by the demands of just one species: homo sapiens. ...

[T]he new research in 161 countries - the most extensive study ever made into humanity's impact on the planet's production of life, powered by the Sun - shows that the Earth is already in serious trouble. In some parts of the world humans are using up far more than 25 per cent of plant life for food, fuel and other needs. ...

Dr Nathan Moore of Michigan State University called the results "alarming". Professor Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, said: "With millions of species sharing the leftovers, it is hard to know how many will be squeezed out of the game."

Global warming will, of course, make this worse, put even more pressure on the environment. But contrary to convenient quick-fix myth, biofuels are not an answer, especially not for a world (and for people) already being pressed to the limit.

(Thanks to Tim at Green Left Infoasis for the link to the Food First report.)